Social housing for the soul

I am sad about the Wendy house. I spent hours on the wretched thing. It has window boxes. It is insulated and wallpapered and has some of the finest furniture ever made out of wooden wine crates that you are likely to see. (Did you know that a child of four is exactly the same length as three wine boxes laid side by side? I'm sure there must be a name for such measure. Noah built the whole ark in cubits and that was probably something based on his kids' forearm length or something.)

Anyway, it now lies void. The children have outgrown it, thus learning at an early age that humans can be very fussy about their habitat. My eldest daughter has moved up in the world and now lords it over us all in a fine loft extension where she conveniently can't hear anyone call her for tea.

At the other end of the scale, there's my friend. She lives in a very smart house in a very smart village. The house is worth a number with many zeros after it and yet she wants to move. It is not quite what she wants, not quite big enough, not quite modern enough and so on. It is lovely but, like the Wendy house, she wants to abandon it.

I mention all this because I recently had a long chat with David Marks and Julia Barfield, the architects who designed the London Eye. After I'd got over the jealousy of learning that they can go on their giant Ferris wheel for free whenever they want to, we moved on to modern housing problems.

They have come up with a revolutionary design for inner-city, high-rise living called a Skyhouse. Straight away, they were at pains to distance their project from the tower blocks of the 1960s.

What was wonderful was that they talked about these potential dwellings in the terms that I or one of my non-housing professional pals might. They mentioned how windy it always seems to be at the base of tower blocks and how unpleasant that is (something to do with how the wind sweeps down and round the building; they've got rid of it). They've put in lots of glass so the building doesn't seem grey and forbidding. It is based on a trefoil design which is pleasing to look at while also allowing for an internal wind turbine to help provide free power.

I don’t know if I would want to be an architect grappling with the problems of inner-city housing: the fact is, humans are an ornery bunch

They've thought about gyms, shops, fire stations and making the building's design environmentally friendly by covering it in small photovoltaic cells to gather solar power. It looks nice, it should be cheap to run and it has added facilities. In short, they've thought about how people want to live.

"What about fire escapes?" I asked. "Aren't people afraid of living in high-rise places these days?" They've thought of that too: multiple escape routes and other architectural buffers of safety which I don't quite understand. The Skyhouse is designed to house real people.

I don't know if I would want to be an architect trying to grapple with the problems of inner-city housing. The fact is that humans are an ornery bunch. We know we need to be warm, out of the rain and sheltered from the wind, but just ticking off those elements won't do in our quest for living space.

I am researching a book that contains a survival element and I will shortly be going off to learn how to build shelters out of twigs and bivouacs out of bushes. I will be looking at the most basic form of house humans can build for themselves in order to survive. I wonder how long it will take me to start looking round my twig-and-brush home and thinking: "I could put a little shelf there … maybe the lawn wants cutting down a bit round the front … I wonder if I could make some pipes out of hollowed branches to get water straight to the house? … Could I convert those upper branches into a bedroom for my eldest? …" and so on.